Sam's Lake (2005)

directed by Andrew C. Erin

South Korea, Canada, USA

87 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This was different than I expected. I watched it solely because Sandrine Holt is in it and I can't believe I'd never heard of it; if not for that reason, then just because I consume a massive amount of horror movies and I find it very odd that somehow this one eluded me while I was searching for new stuff to watch over all these years. It's not terribly obscure, certainly not the most obscure thing I've ever seen, but I guess people just don't like it. I did.

There's something about this movie that feels meditative at the start, and even extending past the intro well into the actual "meat" of the movie (which there is not much of). It's a typical "group of friends go on vacation" horror, but the friends all feel in tune with each other and with their surroundings. I think the difference between this and others with the same premise is that the friend group is not preoccupied with each other, and they seem to be genuinely enjoying their nature retreat. Instead of hooking up and fighting and hooking up and fighting ad infinitum like I usually see boy-girl pairs do in this genre, everybody just sort of enjoys each other's company and relaxes while taking in the lovely environment around them. One of the girls has some earthy spiritual beliefs that aren't poked fun at or presented in a hokey way- it's all very chill, and it doesn't feel deliberate or forced. It's painfully mid-2000s- as soon as I saw the guy in a striped shirt and suspenders under an acid-washed denim jacket with the collar popped, I knew that. There's some egregious singer-songwriter music at one point, but it's just... it's just chill. It's all cool.

The movie remains at this level, measured pace until quite a ways in, and then it reveals that it was a slasher all along, which you knew already. I don't feel like there was an attempt to use the relaxed tone to lead you astray so that the killer's reveal was more surprising; the two halves (or more like the 3/4ths and 1/4th) of the movie are co-existent, the violence of the latter portion doesn't cancel out the calm of the first. I thought that the actress who plays the killer did a particularly good job filling both an innocuous role and the angry, determined murderer role. Everybody in this is fairly decent, but I think "decent" is all their roles really required. There's so little character development that there's nothing to complain about in terms of realism.

I guess maybe I was in the mood for a bland movie, and that's why this satisfied me. I'm not saying it's any great shakes, because it's not, but something about it is just... enough. The characters are developed enough, but no more. The plot is engaging enough- not original, but well-executed enough. The runtime is enough- not too long, not too short. The end is satisfying enough- the part with the keys in the lake had me expecting a sudden hand to pop out of the water. This is a saltines movie. It's good for when you don't feel good and you need something without any flavor that won't upset you to absorb whatever bad feelings you have. And I'm saying this about a film where two people tag-team to kill their whole friend group, so that's saying something. Everybody seems to be faking an accent but that might just be because I was picking up on Fay Masterson's fake accent and it made me suspicious that everyone else was a Covert Brit™ too.

The Road (2009)

directed by John Hillcoat

USA

111 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I've read The Road twice now and it's cemented its place as one of my favorite, if not my most favorite, books of all time. I knew this movie was out there but never thought much of it because it's one of those books that's inherently unfilmable. But we're discussing the book for my book club in a week and I figured it might be fun to see the movie and at least have something to laugh at with the folks there.

This is... not a bad movie, but it's a movie that I don't think should exist, and in fact I'm a little mad at it for existing. It's trying to find something in The Road that just isn't there. No part of The Road exists in the format of a multi-million-dollar movie with A-list stars that you can plunk down in a theater (or at least in 2009 you could) and see. Nothing exists in The Road that is palatable to a wide audience who can simply walk into a theater and get their heartstrings gently tugged and then leave and be fine. The Road as a crowdpleaser is not a thing that exists. So what this movie is doing is butchering something that is an incredibly intimate experience- I don't think it's possible for any two people to read The Road the same way- until it looks like something that everybody can digest the same. There are some lines lifted directly from the book, but they're peppered in with original dialogue, and that just feels like a massive insult to Cormac McCarthy's sorcerer-like ability to write prose. Either do everything exactly as it was in the book or just don't do it at all.

I mean... art is meant to be interpreted by the audience, that's a belief I do hold, so it's within John Hillcoat's rights to read The Road and be like, "hey I can make a blockbuster about this". But it's also within my rights to believe that doing that is an abomination and this movie is an abomination and look I'm really not mad at anybody personally for being involved in it but the fact that it exists makes me upset.

I have to say, though, this movie is way better than I thought it would be aesthetically. Maybe I'm just unimaginative, but to me it captures the feel of the book's environment pretty much dead on. The vision of an utterly grey, lifeless, expansive landscape filled with the detritus of what used to be nature is rendered surprisingly well. In most post-apocalyptic movies we get to see plants and greenery begin to overtake the highways that no longer carry the cars that used to spew the pollutants that killed them. In The Road, everything is absolutely dead, no chance at hope, no chance at survival. The thing that I thought was really striking about the film was all the dead trees- there are several passages in the book that include trees, but I never really thought about what it would be like to be in a forest of just enormous, towering, totally dead trees. The vistas of devastation and charred landscapes are, while still not able to hold a candle to the book, at least one singular thing about this movie that impressed me.

Also, I don't want to seem like I'm constantly on a tirade against background music in film, because I know I often mention disliking it, but the score in this movie is really distracting. I think it would have been ten times better if there were no sound whatsoever except for the howling of wind in the distance and the sounds of trees falling. Reading the book is something that absolutely requires silence, and even if you're not in a quiet environment, the book will kind of create one for you- the sense of solitude rubs off on you when you read it. I couldn't get anywhere near that same feeling of solitude when there was cheesy soppy piano plinking and violins layered over every sentence uttered. Viggo Mortensen acts his ass off throughout this whole movie and even Kodi Smit-McPhee isn't half bad, but nothing can save a movie that shouldn't exist in the first place.

The Signal (2014)

directed by William Eubank

USA

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I can't believe this is only six years old. It feels like it's been out for like a decade. It was new when I first saw it but I decided to rewatch it because I remembered it being very good, but could only recall a few things about it in specific. (Mostly, Laurence Fishburne being mysterious and a guy getting robot legs.) This journey is one best taken without knowledge, so don't read on if you don't want to hear spoilers.

The thing I think is done really well in this film is the sense of scale. Scale seems to be a bit of a running theme through all three of Eubank's films: Underwater is set in the vast depths of the ocean, Love is set in space, and The Signal takes place in a bunch of different locations; partially in the open desert of the Southwest but partially somewhere far stranger (and speaking as a Californian, yeah, the Southwest desert is pretty strange). But even parts that take place when the characters are being held in a mysterious hospital-like facility convey scale, not necessarily in the sense of being within a vast space but in the sense that the world is much larger than the characters are able to comprehend.

I'm really interested in how this movie plays with reality and points of view. Reality is definitely, noticeably strange, and because we as viewers don't know what's going on, but neither do we get the privilege of seeing things through the characters' eyes like if this were a found-footage movie, the point of view through which we watch The Signal is sort of as a fourth wheel to all the characters. We know that there's something going on but being restricted to our human senses hinders us. Essentially, the film is shot with the camera acting as a pair of eyes that have the same limitations as fleshy human eyes as opposed to a man-made camera. We watch the entire film knowing there's something being held back from us but lack the context to figure out what it is.

Despite being a science fiction story, the film also feels very down-to-earth, and I think a lot of that is due to the casting of Brenton Thwaites as the main character. I live in a college town and he looks like every single 18-to-25-year-old white boy here. Tan, sort-of buzzcut, awkward patchy mustache, white t-shirt and blue jeans, the works. He looks so much like a real person and not like an actor, and I know that that's deceptive because I'm sure a lot of money went into making him look so average, but that's why it's impressive. I was also very fond of the costuming so I looked up who was in charge of that: Dorotka Sapinska, who apparently did costumes for literally everything ever (Ender's Game, X-Men Origins, Da 5 Bloods, Into the Badlands on TV, Black Panther, etc) and also Underwater. She seems to be extremely good at creating custom environmental suits that don't just look like modified Hazmat suits but also don't look like something that doesn't exist. I appreciated that here and in Underwater as well.

And now for the part of this review that will have spoilers, because I can't not talk about it. The aliens in this movie are some of the most fascinating I've seen in terms of how opaque their motives and nature are. You never get any answers as to why they're doing what they're doing, but by the time the movie ends it becomes apparent that they're immensely powerful. I don't know if any single event in this movie was "real" or if the entire thing was under their influence from minute one. Did the characters ever really go on a road trip or was it all conducted somewhere else, with unknown entities observing and taking notes? Did the main characters ever really exist? The reveal at the end seems to imply that many of the other characters were simply constructs designed to look human enough to interact with other humans. So where were the aliens? What were they doing? I ask these things, but I would be disappointed to get answers because then a little of the mystery would be taken out of this film. The thing that makes it so good is that we know nothing by the end. It builds up our confidence and we think we have some idea where the characters are, but then the floor drops out from under us and the unseen hand of something much larger shifts behind the curtain. The world The Signal creates is just so immersive and engaging to me- far more so than Underwater. I would love to see this director take on an alien setting like this again.

Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God (1986)

directed by Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu

Japan

40 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie is a little short to get an entire review, but the myriad of excellent splatter films from Japan that came out in the 80s and 90s deserve recognition despite very few of them ever reaching close to an hour's worth of running time. I don't think anybody is watching these things for the plot, and more often than not, the plot is simply an obstruction standing between us viewers and seeing tentacles as early on in the film as possible, but in this case the monster's backstory is genuinely interesting and even quasi-Lovecraftian. If we suppose that in this context there is a God who created all life, imagine a creature that evolved outside of God's purview, that God turned his/her/its/their back from: this is Guzoo, our unholy tentacle monster du jour. And it lives inside a summer house guarded by a mad scientist who keeps it at bay by playing a special song on a flute.

The creature design here is just miles above what I expected. This is the very definition of a typical Lovecraftian shambling monstrosity. It has very few defined parts- no resemblance to an earthly life-form, no discernible eyes or nose or a countable number of limbs, just snapping amorphous jaws at one end of a large, sticky, fleshy-looking body covered in unsettling protrusions and whipping tentacles. The size is perfect- it's not big enough to dwarf the humans but it's not tiny enough to be ridiculous; it's just about the size where, if a dog that big came at you, you'd be really terrified. There's a specific frame towards the end of the film where two surviving girls are running through the house, trying to escape Guzoo, and for a second we see the girls and then Guzoo peeking through the doorway in the background, and I don't know why, but the way the whole sequence is shot is just beautiful to me- Guzoo feels so present, so there. I'm going to try and attach a screenshot from the film here; this is my first time embedding an image in a post so forgive me if it goes awry.

This isn't even a direct Lovecraft adaptation and it gets the whole "squirming tentacle monster" thing down in a way that makes said monster feel far more directly threatening than they typically are. For a splatter film, this veers far more towards dread than the gross-out effect most of its contemporaries go for. It doesn't feel like the intent here was just to make us lose our lunch. There's a distinct ominousness to Guzoo. Its appearance isn't just scary because it looks gross. There's something about Guzoo that conveys a sense of it not being right.

Everything just kind of fizzles out at the end, Guzoo turns into a harmless turtle (?) and the remaining girls limp off into the mist.  People got eaten, property was destroyed, wounds were dealt. But we'll never forget Guzoo, and we'll never stop hoping that maybe, just maybe, 34 years later, somebody with practical effects experience and a love of VHS will continue to carry the Guzoo torch and bring the world a very belated sequel.

The Rental (2020)

directed by Dave Franco
USA
88 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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I let the internet talk me into watching this against my better judgement- I wouldn't have otherwise watched anything by a Franco, but the popularity of it made me curious to see if there was anything worthwhile about it. I really should have trusted my gut because I came away from it feeling like I'd just wasted 88 minutes of my time.

The premise is fantastically unoriginal: Two couples and a French bulldog go to a peaceful rental house by the ocean for a few days of rest, relaxation, and drugs. You have seen literally everything about this movie before. The couples are all having relationship issues and some of them cheat on each other- oh, how unpredictable! How I could never have envisioned a full-length movie about two couples needing to add in some tension in order to make things interesting! I don't think I'm even being unfair due to my Franco bias here, it's just that there is nothing about this that I haven't seen before. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, because it is totally possible to create a satisfying horror experience using standard tropes- you just have to be good at it. And, apologies to Joe Swanberg, who I typically consider better than this, but no one involved here seems to be good at it. I can't help but feel this was a case of everyone around Dave Franco indulging him as a first-time director and never having the heart to admit that his ideas were not interesting at all.

One of my biggest pet peeves in movies and television is when people are in obvious mortal danger, but they still stop to fight over their personal problems, and that's literally all this entire movie is. A bunch of people are in a weird situation but they don't make any attempt to get out of it because they're too busy kissing each others' S.O.s. This is a home invasion/slasher type movie, but I really don't understand what the gimmick was supposed to be. I watched the whole thing hoping that something would happen to justify the amount of praise I've heard, but it just... never did. Is the twist supposed to have been that the creepy racist renter was not, in fact, a murderous creepy racist renter? Because that's a whole other can of peaches we're not even going to open right now. The attempts at ~*addressing inequality*~ by shoehorning in a subplot about how the guy wouldn't rent to one of the girls because she has an Islamic-sounding name is a joke. It felt like Franco was standing up and saying "I am not racist, look how not racist I am. I am writing a character experiencing racism to show that I think racism is bad".

I've seen a couple of slashers that manage to delay the payoff for long enough that it feels more brutal when it comes because by that time we've gotten attached to the characters, and this ain't one. I knew about the murderer, so the whole time I was just waiting for him to show up, and it's not like anything interesting even happened while I was waiting. There's nothing there to occupy the time spent putting off the appearance of the killer- no real humor, no intrigue, no backstory, not even any romance because all these people are, like I said, too busy failing to communicate and lying to each other to have any kind of chemistry or dynamic. The only redeeming quality to this that I could find is that it looks pretty. I also liked the dog. The killer admittedly has an interesting look to him as well, when he finally does show up- if you've seen Hush, the mask he wears is sort of like that in how it blends so well with his face that you have trouble making your brain believe it's not his actual face; an effect that's made even more realistic when he gets stabbed in the face. But it made no ultimate difference whether the killer had a cool mask or not, he was just boring. I didn't buy the attempt to be deep at the end with the back-of-head shots and whatever. This is just a movie I didn't like. I gave it a real chance and I still didn't like it.

The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

directed by Ryûhei Kitamura

USA

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Underneath the city runs an artery that transforms individuals plucked from the unwashed masses into their most basic components of meat and gore, funneling them to a destination beyond imagining. The people who service this artery themselves become an extension of it, their bodies becoming altered and their interactions with the people who used to be their fellow humans reduced to the blank exchange between prey and predator. This artery is the Midnight Meat Train. It has always existed, though not in this form. The price for taking notice of the systematic delivery of human parts to the creatures who feed off of them is your own humanity.

Okay, I apologize in advance here because I did not expect to genuinely enjoy this movie as much as I did. I'd seen it on lists of Lovecraftian films a few times and always wondered, since I knew nothing about it beyond its title, what the Lovecraftian element of it could be. I mean, what kind of meat train are we talking here? Is it a train made out of meat? Is it a train that carries meat, but only at midnight? And how does this relate to the cosmic horror and incomprehensible entities that branding a film as Lovecraftian implies said film to contain? I personally don't agree with that label for this movie, just because I think it's kind of restrictive- by its nature it makes you believe a film is going to be a certain way, and then if it's not, maybe you feel a little disappointed. The Midnight Meat Train should be looked at as its own unique thing with its own unique story, and I think you can get a lot out of this movie if you try to take it as seriously as you can, even though so many things about it just read as ridiculously cheesy.

This is a horror movie shot with all the gloss and perfection of a credit card commercial. I was watching a sub-optimal stream of it and it still looked like it was in HD. This is one of those movies where color is not as important as making every single pixel so sharp you could cut yourself on it. The grayness of a concrete jungle is here polished until it's shiny, and the typical explosion of color that comes from a city with a myriad of different inhabitants and businesses is toned down to a weird blueish-grayish monochrome. Nothing in real life looks like this and that's why it's great. The main character is a photographer who just seems to stumble upon these scenes of criminal activity as he casually walks down the street, taking pictures that expose a seedy underbelly to the city that ends up paling in comparison to the horror of the Midnight Meat Train itself. Still, the crowds walking around all feel innocent somehow, never knowing that getting on the wrong train could take their bodies from them in the most gruesome of ways. The whole city is involved, but it's the people up top who control things down below. The bystanders roaming the streets minding their own business are stuck in the middle.

I really just love the concept of the Midnight Meat Train. I love the name because it's the goofiest possible moniker you could put on something like this. I love the idea that a kind of UberEats for immortal demons who live underground has always existed, even before humans, and that its current form is just a New York City subway. Maybe before, it was a ghost ship crossing the trade routes from country to country. Maybe it was a mysterious horse-and-buggy. Maybe it was a desert caravan. I understand that this was originally a story by Clive Barker- I have not read it, possibly it provides more context. I can't say how accurate Ryûhei Kitamura has been to the source material, but this is a satisfying movie that I was surprised to like so much.

Frankenstein's Army (2013)

directed by Richard Raaphorst

Netherlands, USA, Czechia

84 minutes

4 out of 5 stars

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I've seen this before, but this past weekend has been incredibly stressful and sometimes I don't have the brainpower to process a whole new movie, so I rewatch a favorite. I have a deep fondness for this film that I can't really justify, given that it's pretty silly when you get right down to it, but I'll try to explain why I personally like it so much.

I'm the furthest possible thing from a WWII buff, but I don't think anybody watches Frankenstein's Army for the plot. Most of the reason why the film has anything resembling a following at all is due to its ingenious practical effects, which would make you half-believe the crew had a Frankenstein working among them. The credits refer to the creatures as "zombots", and the movie is populated by them- the evil doctor's half-human, half-robot creations from an era when robotics was generally dirty, grimy, unsophisticated and, at least in the context of the film, rife with unethical human experimentation. There's very little gross-out factor here unless you're extremely squeamish; it doesn't feel like much of an attempt was made to create a situation where you feel genuinely horrified by seeing the robot-human hybrids- the end goal of this seems to solely be to show off a ton of super cool giant robot suits. And that goal is both met and exceeded.

I mean... they're just so cool. There's a 12-year-old-boy sense of awesomeness to this whole deal. Think of the plot: a squadron of Russian soldiers on the warpath to delete Nazis from existence are also secretly on a mission to capture the real, actual Doctor Frankenstein, who produces hulking metal robot zombies. Most 12-year-olds might not be able to appreciate the fact that all of these zombots are made with practical effects, but the premise is appealing in an "oh that's just ridiculous" sort of way. The film adds in touches of humor (that final shot is a riot) that are perfect for the tone of the whole thing, because if this had tried to pass itself off as a serious film, it would have been ruined.

There's a robot with a giant propeller for a face. There's a few with what look like long metal octopus tentacles attached to their arms. Several just have scythe hands. My absolute favorite is a big metal orb tromping around on human legs. I have a real issue with the fact that the only visibly female zombot is, like, visibly female- one would assume that at least some of the other, more grimy-looking robots could have at some point been women, but the only one whose womanhood is emphasized is unfortunately the one who got a metal boob stuck on her and is wrapped up in bandages like Leeloo in the beginning of The Fifth Element. In general this ain't a great film to watch if you're looking for good representation of women, but again, this all feels like it was dreamed up by a pre-teen boy, so.

There are other issues, too. The biggest one for me is that most of the actors aren't Russian. Ironically, almost all of the extras who have little to no speaking roles are Czech, and therefore could have had what might pass to Western ears as a Russian accent, but all of the main actors with the exception of one are not Russian at all. It isn't as egregious as having a white actor filling a non-white role, but the sound of an English person's fake Russian accent is genuinely grating to my ears 98% of the time unless it's seriously well done. A bigger problem than the accents for most viewers would likely be that this is a found-footage movie set during WWII. The film probably would have been better off dropping the found-footage element entirely, because it doesn't have much to do with the plot and there's no real attempt to make it authentic other than bizarre color grading. It does add an element of intimacy as all found-footage settings do, and personally I wasn't too troubled by it because I feel like it makes the movie what it is, but I can see that it might be a deal-breaker to those who have more of an eye for these things than I do. To me, it's just nice to see something that was obviously made as a labor of love, with elbow grease and a lot of scrap metal.

Host (2020)

directed by Rob Savage

UK/USA

56 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Horror movies filmed entirely over a webcam are nothing new, but they have a certain weight to them now. Where previously it was just a gimmick, it's now the everyday life of anyone who wants to talk face-to-face with their friends while still being a responsible person and not risking sickness or infecting others. I have seen Unfriended and a bunch of other movies that use this same format, but Host is the first movie I've watched where the characters are specifically in the same boat as me, and that's a powerful thing. Maybe the novelty will wear off if more people do this, but right now these people are us. Not just depictions of us, us. And for a horror movie, being able to see yourself onscreen is a one-way ticket to being seriously creeped out.

And- keeping in mind the obligatory disclaimer that I don't think we should link a horror film's quality to its ability to freak people out- seriously creeped out, I was. Because of how intimate and familiar the setting was, when that first scene hit where the girl gets dragged across the room in her chair, I was instantly hooked and instantly super unnerved. (Not to mention the fact that my dog kept barking and staring directly at my closet sporadically throughout the whole movie.)

The concept of a ghost haunting you over the internet is also nothing new even for movies that don't stick to a webcam format, but it's interesting that in prior movies, the focus seems to be more on the vector, the screen itself becoming the haunted thing. Glitches that result in faces looking distorted and mysterious messages appearing in the chatroom are more the style that I'm used to in haunted-video-call movies. In Host, though, the chat itself is basically meaningless, just a lens through which we see the individual living spaces of each of the characters slowly getting taken over by a malicious entity. The entity doesn't reside in the chat, it resides in your house with you. Turning off the computer will do nothing. I think that this is interesting because it implies a shift in the way we think about how video chats facilitate our lives. Video chatting isn't detached from us anymore- it's like a new wing of our houses, an extension into the outside world. It's like in movies about a cursed doll or a ouija board where the characters throw away the object that they believe to be haunted, but it does nothing, because it's no longer the object that's haunted. It's them.

I'm still giving this four stars because I loved the originality of it and the uniqueness of the experience, but towards the end I felt like the horror faltered a little in a way that was disappointing. I have an issue with the way all the scares progress, because it feels very... Paranormal Activity-ish. They've got this brilliant unique set-up in a format that no one has really explored before, but the things they make the entity do are all extremely boring and not original at all. The sheet thrown over the invisible figure, the footprints in the flour, the hoisting of people up in the air by invisible hands. I've seen all this. I've never seen it done over Zoom, but still, I've seen all this.

Regardless, though. This movie is a cultural artifact. I mean, all movies are cultural artifacts, but this one is pinned to a time and place forever. This is the perfect example of why I will always love the horror genre: When something new and terrifying is in our lives, we make horror out of it. When something scares us and we can't fight it, we add ghosts to it. We find ways to incorporate the real-life scary thing into the annals of fictional scary things that we have a vocabulary to understand. If we can stack the thing we're afraid of because it's real next to things we're afraid of that are not real, then we can begin to equip ourselves to fight it. I do apologize for being corny here but I sincerely believe horror movies are more important comfort tools during this pandemic than ever.

Family Romance, LLC (2020)

directed by Werner Herzog

Japan

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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As usual, I feel like I can't talk about Werner Herzog's films without sounding like an idiot, so I apologize in advance for sounding like an idiot. The reason I feel this way is because in my mind Herzog is an Intelligent™ director. One you have to be versed in film theory to fully understand. I don't believe he himself would agree with this statement, given that he seems to have an appreciation for "vulgar" or lowbrow art (like wrestling), but it's the way I feel, even though I wouldn't ask that anybody else have a grasp on film theory before throwing on Aguirre for fun. You do what you want.

Family Romance, LLC is a strange one. It's strange for Werner Herzog as a white man to make a film that's exclusively, inextricably about Japan and Japanese people. The film has a sort of half-documentary style that is one of the only things I can say with confidence is a trademark of Herzog's filmmaking, and it's why this is such an interesting movie to me- it plays with themes of reality/performance and documentary/fiction in a way that encapsulates everything Herzog frequently works with. I think part of why I struggle to feel like I'm fully understanding his films is because you do frequently have to have at least a little background before going into them; it's not required, but it helps you contextualize them, and it feels different if you're used to just putting on whatever horror movie Netflix regurgitates and not having to think about where it came from. I enjoy that I'm forced to think about not just what's onscreen but what went into making what I'm seeing. It feels deeply real and not just fake-real: at some points I swear I can hear the cameraperson breathing. Apparently the crew was told to disperse at least once because they didn't have authorization to be filming where they were. Herzog shot over 300 minutes of film for this. In scenes where the public is involved, people stop and stare, blurring if not obliterating the line between who is and is not in the film.

One of the most striking moments in the whole thing comes when the main character is in the lobby of a hotel where the receptionists are robots. The humans in the shot are barely actors, so what does that make the robots in the background, performing the actions they've been programmed into? I can't explain the way it made me feel when the camera zoomed slowly on the robot receptionist giving his lines. 

Who is an actor? What is acting? What is fiction? Who is involved in the making of a film, and who is not?

In the case of Family Romance, LLC, it's important to know that the lead "actor" (everyone in this is a non-professional actor) is actually the proprietor in real life of the business the film is based around. For context, this is a movie about Japan's "rent-a-person" industry, where stand-ins for family members or friends are lent out by a company to people who want to fill an absence in their life, whatever that absence may be. For that reason, the film isn't quite a documentary but almost gets there- to have the owner of a business play themselves in a scripted, fictional set-up involving their business is a deeply Herzogian premise. Although it may not have entirely been documentary, it's very close to it- and what is documentary, anyway? There can never truly be a documentary without trace of a narrative voice. Playing with this fact opens up avenues of possibility to new ways of making film, and new ways of experiencing film as an audience. The potential for this movie to be enjoyed by a casual viewer just looking to watch a movie is pretty low, but if you know what you're getting into beforehand, this is a fascinating exploration of all the things Werner Herzog is known for. I'm so glad he's still putting 'em out like this. Seeing this movie was a pleasure.